Thousands of fed workers still face Phoenix pay woes

Some 13,500 staff being paid too little or too much with no timeline to fix glitchy system

OTTAWA— There are still at least 13,500 federal workers with pay problems as the public service continues to slog through its troubled transition to the new Phoenix payroll system, according to a government update Wednesday.

Of those 13,500 employees, 7,000 were from the original backlog identified last year, which has been chipped down from 82,000 over the past several months. The remaining 6,500 are workers who since last July have reported receiving the wrong pay after going on or returning from job leave, the bureaucrat in charge of the program told reporters.

“I really thank everybody for their patience. I wish there would be quicker and simpler ways to fix the pay issues. We are working very hard,” said Marie Lemay, a deputy minister at Public Services and Procurement Canada, during a press conference Wednesday.

Lemay said she couldn’t give an accurate timeline for when the backlog would be cleared.

“The one thing you have to know is that there is light at the end of the tunnel. This thing is getting better. I know it will get better,” she said. The new payroll system was brought in by the former Conservative government and implemented in February 2016, four months after Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party took power.

Problems surfaced in the ensuing weeks, with tens of thousands of federal workers who were either getting paid too little or too much.

Chris Aylward, national executive vice-president with the Public Service Alliance of Canada, which represents thousands of federal workers, called the Phoenix problems a “national disgrace.”

He added that his union is working with the government to get the system fixed, especially as tax season approaches.

“It continues to cause issues and problems for federal public workers, which is totally unacceptable,” he said.

Speaking earlier, Lemay admitted that payroll officers — and managers throughout the public service — weren’t given enough training on the Phoenix system.

She also urged employees with errors on their paycheques to reach out so that their 2016 tax slips can be corrected.

The payroll woes have also come up during Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s public speaking tour this month. Speaking in Kingston, he fielded a heated question about Phoenix from a man who said he was a corrections officer.

“I’ll admit it. This government, in everything we were doing in the first months, didn’t pay enough attention to the challenges and the warning signs that were coming with the transition we were overseeing,” Trudeau said.

Lemay has previously said that it could cost more than $50 million to fix the Phoenix problems. Auditor General Michael Ferguson is also probing the problematic payment system and has called the situation “unacceptable.”

The goal now is to shift resources from shrinking the backlog to dealing with pay change and overtime requests that are currently taking too long to process, said Lemay.

Lemay said that, of the 7,000 cases remaining from the original backlog, many of them are “so complex” that they can’t be automatically processed through a computer program.

When asked about new cases that have come up since July 2016, Lemay said there were an additional 14,000 reported cases from federal workers getting the wrong paycheques. Roughly 2,800 of those weren’t getting paid at all, though each has been remedied now, Lemay said.

But there are still 6,556 cases of pay errors from the second half of 2016 — bringing the total number of outstanding cases in the backlog to more than 13,500.

Federal workers can claim out-ofpocket expenses they’ve incurred because of payroll issues, and request financial support from the organizations they work for, according to the public services website. The department has also upped its call centre services to speed up the processing of pay changes.